Did Non-Shooting ‘Friendly Fire’ Kill Chinese American Soldier?

The story of Private Danny Chen of the U.S. Army should rouse the sometimes politically somnambulant and highly diversified Asian American community, and revive questions of whether Asian American soldiers are indeed safe among their colleagues.

“Soldier’s Death Raises Suspicions in Chinatown” was the headline in today’s New York Times front page. It told of New York Chinatown’s reactions to the mysterious death of Pvt. Chen, a 19-year-old from New York City. On Oct. 3, he was found shot to death in a guard tower on an American outpost in Afghanistan.

We don’t know yet the precise circumstances of Pvt. Chen’s death, but the story hints at a possible suicide, perhaps rooted in part in racist harassment from fellow American soldiers. In other words, a non-shooting kind of “friendly fire.”

If that turns out to be the case, then one has to wonder about the safety of other Asian American soldiers — from other American soldiers, not insurgent Iraqis or Taliban adversaries. The New York Times story mentions the suicide in April of this year of Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, a Marine from California, in Afghanistan “after fellow Marines allegedly subjected him to a brutal hazing.”

We’re talking about young Asian American men wearing the uniform of the U.S. military, sworn to fight the enemy alongside their white, black, brown, and multicolored brothers and sisters. These young Asian American soldiers are not the enemies, yet apparently in some cases, they kind of are treated as though they were the enemy or the very least “foreigners” or “aliens,” based on their racial and ethnic backgrounds.

“I get made fun of for being Asian/Chinese everyday but it’s not hard core,” The Times story quoted Pvt. Chen as telling his parents in a letter home.

This kind of harassment isn’t really news among Chinese Americans and Asian Americans, even in our so-called “post-racial” era after Americans elected Barack Obama, half-white, half-black, as their president. The first 100 years or so of Asian American history is nothing if not racial harassment, violence, hatred, and, yes, the only piece of national legislation to explicitly racially discriminate against a specific ethnic group, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that wasn’t repealed until 1943.

Since World War II, conditions have greatly improved for people of Asian descent in the United States. Today, some are even superstars in technology, medicine and science, architecture, literature, sports, entertainment, media, education, and business. A relative handful are now political insiders.

But there remains a nagging reservoir of racism, hatred, ignorance, and stupidity among some Americans toward their yellow brothers and sisters. The cases of Lance Cpl. Lew and, possibly, Pvt. Chen are contemporary examples.

If Pvt. Chen’s death is indeed a suicide, triggered in part by the racial harassment he experienced from fellow American soldiers, then I hope those handful of Asian American political insiders and the network of Asian American civil-rights organizations press the military leadership, civilian and uniformed, to get to the bottom of the matter and demand some accountability from those responsible.